It was the gloaming of a late March day when the reefed top-sails of the Good Intent showed up against the horizon of bleak slate-grey which was the Irish Sea. The North Channel foamed boisterously to the left, heaping many waters together, a perpetual cave of the winds, a play-ground for errant tides, or rather, as the folk on its shores say, the meeting-place of all the Seven Seas.
From early morning they had been standing off, not daring to approach nearer till assisted by the westward rush of the Solway tides and the darkness which would hide everything. Captain Penman was a man of few words, and these few he did not waste. Inwardly he was boiling over at the ill-luck of his first spring run. He cursed Stair Garland and Julian Wemyss for mixing private quarrels with so sacred a mission as that of hoodwinking his Majesty's Customs.
"As good a cargo as ever came past the Point of Ayre," he grumbled, "and if young Garland had been attending to his business, we might have run it at the Mays Water as easy as changing money from one trousers pocket to the other. But now I must put these people on shore with the whole countryside humming with Preventives, and as like as not a brig-o'-war hovering about. There always is, when soldiers take a hand. The authorities get into a flurry and order up everything that can carry a gun. I shall have to make for Balcary or that narrow shingly cur's hole of a Portowarren, where a ship can't turn between the Boreland heuchs and the reefs of Port Ling. Then there are never enough boats there, and three tides will not serve to clear her. Why could not Kennedy McClure mind his business, which is also my business? He has been witched, as if he were only twenty, by this lass of Adam Ferris's. And the more shame to him that has passed sixty without ever a chick or a child to hamper him, or a petticoat to drag him to church o' Sundays!"
Yet for all his abuse this close-lipped captain of the Good Intent allowed Patsy many favours. She was often beside him on the bridge, and the Captain would explain to her quite patiently why they were hanging off and on, when the cliffs of the Back Shore were clearly visible, and for a little while even she could make out through the glass the twin rifts of the Valleys of Abbey Burnfoot and the Mays Water.
"Ye see, bairn," Captain Penman would say, "we can see nothing at all of what is going on ashore, while to a Preventive man up on the heuchs yonder with a spy-glass, we are as plain to be seen as a fly on white paper. I changed her rigging about a bit in the winter months, but for all that there is something about the auld Good Intent that makes her as easy to be told as the well-weathered brick-red of a sea-going face on shore!"
But of course Patsy was eager and impatient. She was hard to be held.
"If it is of your cargo you are thinking, why not go straight in and land us? Then you can take your tea and lace and brandy further on."
Captain Penman looked at the girl beside him, and was sorry for her disappointment.
"I would if I could, Mistress Patsy, but they would only grip the whole of you the moment you stepped on shore. Then that rough-haired rascal with the armoury in his belt would loose off half-a-dozen shots before they got him mastered, that would send you all straight to prison. And that's no place for them that want to help their friends in trouble. Besides, there are King's ships about, and who knows whether the wind may hold? If it dropped, we should be taken—all the lot of us, and the Good Intent with her fine winter's cargo would be made a gauger's prize! No, bairn, we are better biding here till the dark of the night comes and then—we shall see where we can set you ashore!"
"Weel, Captain," interrupted Kennedy McClure, who had come up from below, "what think ye of the landing? Can we make the auld place within the bight of the Mays Water? That would be the nearest to the Bothy on the Wild o' Blairmore!"